Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Forty-one

Milagrita hadn’t seen her brother Esteban and his amigos since they chased Trin out of the Mission Street pizza joint. The less she saw of them, the more she worried. What if they, like she, had ferreted out his spare apartment key? What if his paycheck stubs were in the apartment? It preyed on her mind.

So after work that night, she worked her way through back alleys to come out behind Trin’s place in the 900 block of Florida Street. She climbed a tree to get over the fence and wormed her way through the concrete runoff to find the rock with the key under it. And came nose-to-nose with the big tortoise who had lived there for fifty years and more.

“Wish me luck, turtle,” Milagrita whispered to him.

The tortoise half-pulled in his head and feet to opt out.

She climbed the creaky wooden stairs to Trin’s back door, unlocked it, slipped in, stood in the darkened kitchen with her heart pounding wildly. She had never done anything like this before. As she passed through the connecting door to the living room fronting Florida Street, she was seized from behind, run right across the room, and rammed face-down onto the couch.

“I tell your brother I wait long enough, he will come back,” sneered Jorge’s hate-filled voice from above and behind her. “Instead, you come to meet your lover. Even better! I’ll tell Esteban I see you through the window getting undressed.”

She squirmed around to look up at him in the semidarkness. Jorge was handsome in the Ricky Martin mode, and vain about it. Curly black hair, dark expressive eyes, a shapely nose, a full-lipped, vulnerable mouth. He made her sick.

“Esteban will not believe you.”

But she knew her brother would. Thank the Virgin, it didn’t sound as though Jorge had thought of looking for something that would tell him where Trin worked. She stood up gingerly. She had never been so terrified, but she must not let it show.

“I shall leave now,” she said formally in Spanish.

But Jorge seized her and smeared his sneering face against hers, mouth open and tongue darting. Instinctively, she brought her knee up between his legs. It was mostly ineffectual, but he grunted, loosened his grip; she ran for the kitchen. He was on her from behind, spun her around, his fist broke her nose and chipped two of her front teeth. He hit her again, in the belly.

She felt darkness engulfing her. She had no breath, no strength, no will to resist. For a long time there was only him on top of her, thrusting and grunting his harsh triumph.

She was sprawled face-down on the couch. Blood from her mouth stained the fabric. She knew only pain. Jorge grabbed her long black hair to jerk her head back.

“You ain’t ever gonna tell your brother what you made me do to you tonight, little whore.” He held up his cell phone. “You just gonna call Morales and tell him you waiting for him with your legs spread. After I call Esteban and tell him Morales is coming here, you gonna leave right away, comprende?”

“But Esteban will kill him!” she whimpered.

“No, I gonna do that. Then, any time I say, you will come crawling.” He thrust the phone into her hands. “I know a little whore like you has got a secret number you can call your lover.”

She didn’t, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. She had only one little forlorn hope. “I... all right. I... I’ll call.”

Giselle, working late, was just leaving her desk when her private phone rang. A small, pain-filled, Spanish-accented voice exclaimed weakly in her ear, “Trin! I’m so glad I caught you.”

Milagrita! In trouble! Thank God she had given the girl her private number. Giselle sat back down, grabbed a memo pad.

“Keep talking to Morales,” she said. “Where are you?”

“At your place,” Milagrita said in a sad parody of banter.

“Is someone there with you?”

“Of course. And waiting for you.”

“Jorge?” Milagrita’s silence was confirmation. “Are you hurt?” Silence. “Raped?” More silence. Giselle thought of calling an ambulance, then realized the first priority had to be getting her away from Jorge. “Can you leave there?”

“Soon as you can, querido,” she said with a ghastly giggle.

“Bryant and Twenty-second? In ten minutes?” That was two blocks from Morales’s apartment, only three blocks from S.F. General Hospital’s Emergency and Trauma Center.

“I can hardly wait,” said Milagrita faintly.

Where was Morales? If he was out in the field, and went home to his apartment, he’d run right into the ambush. If he was here, it would be all right.

Morales was lying on the cot in the personal property room in his underwear, reading a Spanish language newspaper. When Giselle stuck her head in, he started up in alarm. She waved him back to his place.

“I know you’ve been sleeping here, it’s okay. I was just looking for Mr. K—”

“Like hell.” Morales swung his stockinged feet to the floor. “I heard you tell him good night half an hour ago.” He grabbed her arm with shocking speed and strength at odds with his almost feminine intuition of her distress. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Milagrita?”

She shook him off. “Never mind that. Just don’t go home, all right? They’re waiting there for you.”

“Jorge done something to her,” Trin said with certainty.

She didn’t reply, just ran out, leaving him fumbling under the cot for his shoes. She clattered down the stairs. Ballard, coming in the back door, stopped dead at sight of her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“A little Spanish girl has been raped. I’ve got to—”

“Need help?”

“No.” She paused. “Yes. She’s the sister of the guy who beat up Morales.” She jerked her head at the stairs. “Keep him here, Larry. He wants to face those thugs all alone.”

Ballard’s face went dead. “He can fight his own fights.”

She ran out the door for her Alfa. Too many minutes had passed already. As she left the garage, Ballard was unconcernedly strolling back across the street to his truck.

She yelled out of her window, “You’re a real turd, Larry!”

Ballard watched her roar away down Eleventh Street. She was wrong, dammit. Fucker deserved all things bad. Didn’t he?

He got into his truck, turned on his C/B radio.

Jorge waited just inside Trin’s front door, watching the street through the filmy curtain. Esteban was parked in front of the apartment, Manuel was hidden in a recessed entry a few houses to the south, Pedro hidden in a similar recess to the north. No car passed. No window curtain twitched. No one walked the street. These four were known and dreaded in the neighborhood.

And here came stupid Morales, parking and walking across Florida Street right into the trap. Jorge swaggered down the steps of the apartment, baseball bat in hand. Morales stopped, looking up. Esteban, unseen, silently got out of his car right behind Morales. Like last time — only now Esteban had a knife.

Morales told Jorge, “Your mother gives blow-jobs to dogs.”

Esteban, grinning, knife in hand, said to Trin’s back, “And you are a pig to be butchered, maricón.”

Trin whirled around. Manuel and Pedro were moving in from the sides. Morales was boxed in and all alone. He put his back to a wrought-iron railing flanking the sidewalk.

“Come and get it,” he said to them all, fists clenched.

They came. They got it.

Because three other men materialized out of the night behind them as Trin gaped in surprise. One was tall and blond and muscular. One was shorter and black and wide as a door. One was huge and quick and hard-faced. None of them was shy.

Ken Warren grabbed Manuel by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, ran him out into the middle of Florida Street, and spun like a shot-putter to hurl him bodily against the side of a parked car. Manuel’s face broke the car’s window. The car’s window returned the favor.

Bart Heslip had already driven a tremendous kidney punch into Esteban’s unprotected back. Esteban screamed and dropped his knife and would have fallen down except Heslip slapped him up against his own car and began pumping combinations into him.

Meanwhile, Larry Ballard’s yawara stick, the medieval Buddhist monks’ lightning bolt of Siva, flicked the bat out of Jorge’s hand. “Take him, Morales!” Larry shouted, and sent the yawara stick spinning after Pedro. It swept the fleeing man’s legs out from under him. Then Ballard was on him.

No science, no finesse to Trin’s attack on Jorge: head-butts, elbow smashes, steel-toed work boots. Jorge’s nose went from shapely to mushroom in one awful instant. Blood and teeth flew in several directions at once. Trin only stopped kicking the inert mass on the sidewalk so he could crouch down and bring his face close to what had been Jorge’s face. It was crying.

“You ever touch Milagrita, you will eat your own cojones,” said Morales. “You believe what I say to you, man?”

The crying mess somehow was able to mouth, “Sí.”

Trin stood up. He met Ballard’s gaze. Ballard must have called the others on the C/B radio from his truck. And they had come. The two men nodded almost formally to each other.

Manuel was unconscious in the middle of the street.

Pedro was unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk.

Esteban was erect against the side of his own car, but only because Bart was holding him up so he could deliver his line.

“We know where you live, pal,” he said in soft menace.

And let go. Esteban could finally fall down. He did.

For the first time in his life, Trinidad Morales had his own band of amigos, his own posse. From somewhere not too far off came the sound of police sirens. Ken Warren spoke.

“Hngleth nyetta hehl hnougtta hneer!”

So they got to hell out of there.

Just before the sedatives put her under, Milagrita managed to mumble to the S.F. General Emergency Room doctor that she didn’t know who had done it. Just... someone in an alley...

Giselle was equally vague. Never saw her before in my life. Good Samaritan, that’s all. Found her, brought her in.